What we're reading

Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton tells an interesting story about Rick, your top contributor, and how your team's strength is not about individual talent, but a function of collaboration, tenacity, and mutual respect. We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made. — 8 minutes

What we're reading

Lena Shaw explains the current state of Sales and Marketing stacks with companies invested in a number of siloed tools and platforms, and how in 2017 we should be looking to trim down with "best of breed" tools that should lead to better efficiency through the funnel. Making MarTech Consolidation Work for Your Business — 3 minutes

Ayaz Nanji points out the top three Sales challenges of 2017; too much time on non-sales activities, finding the right assets to assist in their sale, and spending time with prospects and clients. The Top Sales Challenges of 2017 — 2 minutes

Jim Brodo explains something that almost all of us have experienced: marketing fatigue. You know, like when you download some content and in return your inbox and voicemail gets filled up. Jim includes five marketing strategy areas to reconsider in order to avoid giving your prospects marketing fatigue. Your Buyers Are Experiencing Marketing Fatigue; Here's What to Do About It — 9 minutes

Casey Renner talks with Joe Sexton about preparing a startup sales organizations for going public. Great tips in here about sales enablement, using a formula-driven approach to scaling, and that everything starts and ends with the customer.Preparing Your Sales Org to Go Public — 13 minutes

Tomasz Tunguz tackles the tricky question of how to structure the compensation sales teams should get and how developing sales motions, customer success sophistication, and compensation structures to enable growth is a key area for a SaaS businesses. How Much To Compensate SaaS Sales Teams — 4 minutes

Meme of the week

On Wednesday, Beyoncé shared a photo of herself pointing at a menu, and (as expected) the internet did it's thing and quickly repurposed it into a quality meme.

David Skok identifies a third crucial startup skill: recruiting. This is the first post in an on-going series focusing on recruitment processes to find and sell passive candidates on your business. Part 1: Top of the Funnel — Sourcing — 11 minutes

Meme of the week

We all remember Lil' Bow Wow, right? The cute little 13-year old hip-hop sensation from 2000.

Well, there's now something called the Bow Wow challenge, a social media challenge that has taken over similar to the mannequin challenge of 2016.

You may ask, how did this start?

Bow Wow, like most of us, made the attempt to make his life look a little cooler than it actually was in a recent Instagram post. Too bad for Bow Wow, he was exposed on Snapchat showing that he was actually travelling coach with the rest of us common folk.

The challenge: post a picture online showing something deceptively aspirational, followed by the reality of what it actually is and include #BowWowChallenge.

For more on the story, and examples of the best #BowWowChallenge so far, go here.

John Rode breaks down what sales capacity is, and why it's imperative to build into your plan the time it takes to get from "we need to hire more reps" to those reps being fully ramped up. What's Really Driving Your Sales Capacity? — 4 minutes

Meme of the week

Instead of going for a funny meme this week, we've got something that is ... out of this world.

Basically, the Juno probe was launched back in 2011, and it orbits around Jupiter collecting information about its atmosphere and structure. Every so often, Juno dips into low altitude starts to collects photos.

NASA released those images earlier this month and German mathematician, Eichstaedt, went to work putting the photos together into a breathtaking video that you need to watch.